Patrick White

Sitting In The Night At My Desk - Poem by Patrick White

Sitting in the night at my desk, trying not to intrude on my silence and solitudeI'm beginning to glow like a motherlode of gold hidden deep in a heart of dark, dark ore as the gas furnace cracks its pipes like the Tin Man learning to play drums with brass knuckles onand my cat chirps in her sleep beside me and the goldfish are grazing on oxygenat the surface of their becalmed tank, three flames of a water ballet hanging like the bent tines of a trident or the inverted candelabra of some flower that blooms in fire as if a quiet comet were passing through the roomuncertain whether it's an arsonist in a library or a funeral home, depending on the ghost you talk to.

Big night out there. No stars. Nothing moving. The clouds are holding a pillow of snow over the face of the town as it sleeps. I can't see anyone's eyes and there's nothing I can say to the dreamcatchers in the windows about the quality of the picture-music their listening to that's making them feel like spiderwebs other than spring's coming, the butterflies will be out soonand we'll all hang out like flypaper sticky with stars.

But in here where I'm witnessing my awareness of I amas if I were swimming in a sea of nocturnal sapphires, the first draft of a deciduous starmap caught in the vertiginous eddies and whirlpools of the black holes and supernovas exploding like fireflies and lighthouses in distant island galaxies trying to warn me away from the rocks, I go along with things like moonrise on a lake when there is one, or mermaids singing like the Burgess Shale on the mountaintops of lunar shadows creeping across their dead seabeds like the long wavelengths of an outgoing tide.

The life of the mind isn't mine though I'm still delusional enough to think I've taken possession of my heart. Let the wind blow like the spiritual broom of an enlightened rehab center and try to sweep my mirage away like stars from the stairwells of a desert, let it huff and puff as it will, no matter, it stays like a mirror that's been kind to me.

It's as important to have a fool in your life that makes you laugh at yourself or at least break a smile you can be loyal to, as it is to honour a wise man with garlands and laurels and words he has no need of. I'd rather be denuded by the fingertips and lips of love than skinned by the manicured nails and scalpels of clarity.Or let it make this scarred wolf-hide into a drumhead if it must but once the duststorm in the hourglass has passed and time has come to the end of its traplines like a good thing that couldn't last, I'll still be standing here as I am tonight in my tattoos and starmaps with the tears I painted in my own blood under their eyes like ripe plums about to thunder like a pulse in the ears of the abyss.

The banshee of the train whistle goes looking for her lost child like an orphan she abandoned in the woods. Even under the duff and detritus of last year's works the wet night bleeds of light by putting leeches on their eyelidsto draw the four humours of their infectious visions out, I can feel the wild-eyed crocuses blooming like the cervixes of spring unashamed of their sex.

I can feel the heat of the sun like a bemused caresson the grey cedar driftwood of my arm as if all these puppets in chaos beside the lake were made of flesh and bone as small snapping turtles lay their shields against the gunwales of a half-sunken log in the warrior hall of a Viking funeral ship on fireat Lance aux Meadows in Newfoundland watching the ice bergs drift by like lazy, white whales in search of the Titanic and the Pequot caught with their lifeboats down like the typical hubris of an anachronistic biblical death wish to drown like Narcissus in their own ship-wrecked reflections, like critical questions left unansweredby the Attic dialect of a chorus of satyrs celebrating life at a sacrifice of tragic scapegoats.

Imagine that as if you were one of the voodoo dolls, strawdogs, or a scarecrow of smouldering hay that smells like methane in the sun as the snow rots around you like an archipelago of lunar leper colonies trying to imperialize the moon as they lose sight of the last of their shorelines to global warming,

I say to myself in compassionate tones of Wilfred Owen, the poetry's in the pity, not the wherefore of the atrocity.Mine moves in like the shapeshifting wraiths of a cool foginto a no man's land of dead trees sticking out of the lake like crucifixes and stakes where my ghosts can breathe freely like comets at their own wakes in a detoxified upper atmosphere of northern lights whose veils are neither a seance nor a summons to a mystic exorcism in the green sunsets of ochre mustard gas.

I lay a wreath of cedar boughs down on the lake like a poultice of moonlight to remember them byand cool their eyes kissing each of them to sleepto keep them from feeling like bats smoked out of an atticwhere we keep the dismembered toys of our childhood memories we're not in the habit of playing with anymore as if we grew bored with trying to destroy them.

A shudder of cobalt blue in the sky, and here comes the sun like a burning bush of vagrant tumbleweed in the ghost town of a deserted zodiac, thinking it can tell me what to do again like a prophetic errand boy with messages for a pharaonic reality of lesser magicians trying to drive the golden chariot of the sun like corporate executives and spin doctors of Amun Ra through the gunshot slums of a great wound in the side of the Red Sea in the morning that's about to overwhelm them in sunamis of fanatical holy blood on the wings of a burning doveconsumed by self-immolations of savagely righteous indignationthat the night should end in exile, and the daythat's journeyed so far from what it used to knowwake up alone and homeless as a love lyric in ashes to this.